How do I do it all?

I get this question a lot. My usual answer might be something like, “I just do the best I can” and may or may not include something along the lines of, “Praise the Lord, He gives me the strength to get through it.”  On certain days, when I could care less about appearances because I’m just too darn exhausted, my response might be, “Are you kidding me? I have no idea. I’m just barely making it through the day.”

Today, my friends, is one of those days!

We’ve been rearranging furniture in the entire house (post to follow at some point…) to prepare for baby. It has been almost as labor intensive as moving. We moved/rearranged 5 entire rooms in our house. Whew!

My office was out of commission for about 4 days, so when I woke up on this Monday morning, I had to get busy trying to play catch up on the stuff that was late and/or most important.

At the end of the day, I would say I fared pretty well. I got about 9 solid hours of office work done, did 2 hours of school/game playing with Gracie, went through the boys’ Monday folders after school (looked over papers, signed permission slips, etc.), did some homework with them, entertained them (broke up a few fights) cooked and fed them dinner, got them all tucked in bed one by one with talking and stories and prayers and even enjoyed a long, hot bath while reading my bible.

However, this is what my laundry and dishes situation looks like at this very moment.

Just for the fun of it, I snapped some pictures before I got in bed tonight with my laptop to unwind a bit.

This is in the floor of my bedroom. This pile of clean but unfolded clothes is as tall as Gracie and is as long as Braden is tall. It is also about 3 ft wide. What you can’t see is the overflowing basket behind this pile. All the rest of that junk is stuff that still hasn’t found a home in all the rearranging.

And here’s the other side of my room. More clean clothes. And more junk that needs a home.

There’s 3 more laundry hampers full of dirty clothes as well as a load in the dryer at this moment. There’s also a few loads of dirty blankets that I had to stack on a table in the garage because I just have nowhere else to put them.

Oh, and here’s my kitchen. I did 2 loads of dishes on Sunday, but you’d never know it.

And this kitchen counter has been completely cleaned off and bleached 3 times since Sunday morning. You’d never know it by the way it looks now.

Sigh.

No matter what I do, something is always behind. It’s either the office work or the house work. There aren’t enough hours in the day or enough energy in my body to keep up with all of it simultaneously.

I will say, however, that the rest of my house is in decent condition. For once. Well, as long as you don’t go in the bathrooms anyway. They’re all horrendous.

So, there you have it. That’s my confession on “how I do it all”.

I guess the honest and correct answer is, I don’t.